Christian spirituality from a woman's perspective

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Waiting, waiting, waiting…

Ok, I really don’t want this to turn into a mommy blog and I don’t want to bang on about children, but the more time I spend with my daughter the more I gain new perspectives on my relationship with God. And the latest is around the waiting, waiting, waiting we sometimes have to do or feel God puts us through.

When I am making Beth her breakfast she manages to be calm for about 1 minute before she starts to make little whining noises – even though she can see me making it. If I don’t get a move on these whines turn into pseudo crying (because she obviously thinks that will get her the food faster) finally, if I really take a while (3 minutes or more…) we get tears.

This morning I said to her “These things take time, everything has to be done in sequence you know, everything at the right time” – no she is not a child genius, she can’t actually understand, though it did stop her crying – but it suddenly put me in mind of how we react to God when we don’t get the things we want at the time we want them. And God’s reaction to us.

We all desire things and we think we need or should have them as soon as the desire strikes us. But we live in a time-limited dimension. Our bodies use time to move us through it, to allow us to interact with it. What do we want from God? The suspension of the natural order so that we can get married/find a job/fall pregnant/recover from an operation when we think the time is right? Well, yes. And it would be nice, but for whatever reason that’s not actually how the world works – literally.

And yet it’s so difficult to relax and trust in God because our future is unknown to us. We’re like Beth – we know what we want, but we don’t know enough to know whether we’ll get it and we can’t imagine happiness without it.

A word about God then in all this. I respond to Beth by calming her, encouraging her and getting on with making breakfast – but I don’t give it to her straight away as either it’s not finished or it’s just not time. I don’t judge or condemn her for it.

Not being able to trust God and just wait is something we all have to strive to master – but though that’s what we should do, God doesn’t condemn us for our failure to achieve it.

An appropriate thought I think as we head into Advent, and wait for God to do something to deal with the mess the world is in.